A PROBLEM IN HUMAN EVOLUTION. 



257 



upon the chin and lip, and while we can admire an African or a North 

 American Indian with a smooth and glossy cheek, we turn with dislike 

 from thin and scanty hair either in a European, a negro, or an Asiatic. 

 It seems to me that in every case the general aesthetic feeling of the 

 whole human race is the same ; but that in one tribe circumstances 

 have made it easier to produce one type of beauty, while in another 

 tribe other conditions have determined the production of another type. 

 Thus, in a negro, a very black and lustrous skin, clear bright eyes, 

 white teeth, and a general conformity to the normal or average negro 

 features are decidedly pleasant even to Europeans when once the or- 

 dinary standard has become familiar ; * while in a European the same 

 eyes and teeth are admired, but a white skin, a rosy complexion, and 

 moderate conformity to the ideal Aryan type are demanded. Each is 

 alike pretty after its own kind, though naturally the race to which we 

 each ourselves belong possesses in most cases the greatest attractive- 

 ness to each of us individually. 



Of course, both in the beard of man, and in the general hairiness 

 of his body, as compared with woman, allowance must be made for 

 that universal tendency of the male to produce extended tegumentary 

 modifications, which, as Mr. Wallace has abundantly shown, depends 

 upon the superior vigor of that sex. Yet the period when the beard 

 first shows itself and the loss of color in the hair of both sexes after 

 the reproductive period is past clearly stamp these modifications as 

 sexual in origin. 



It must be remembered also, in accounting for the general loss of 

 hair on both back and front of the body, that the older ancestral hered- 

 ity would tend to make the chest bare, and the newer acquired habits 

 would tend to produce like results upon the back. " In the adult male 

 of the gorilla," says Du Chaillu, " the chest is bare. In the young 

 males which I kept in captivity it was thinly covered with hair. In 

 the female the mammae have but a slight development and the breast 

 is bare." All this helps us to see how the first steps in the sexually 

 selective process might have taken place, and also why the trunk is on 

 the whole more denuded than the legs. As for the exceptional fact 

 that the arms are hairier on the back than in front, besides the func- 

 tional explanation already given, we must recollect that the anthropoid 

 apes have long hair on the outer side of the arms, which has probably 

 left this slight memento of its former existence on the human subject. 

 Eschricht has pointed out the curious fact that alike in man and the 

 higher quadrumana this hair has a convergent direction toward the 

 point of the elbow, both from above and from below. 



Finally, it may be noted that the hairless condition of man, though 



* The mutilations of the face and other parts, which often make savages so ugly in 

 our eyes, though not in their own, are due, as Mr. Herbert Spencer ha's shown, not to 

 {esthetic intentions, but to originally subordinative practices, as marks of subjection to a 

 conquering king or race. 

 VOL. XT. 17 



